This blog comments on a variety of technology news, trends, and products and how they connect. I'm in Red Hat's cloud product strategy group in my day job although I cover a broader set of topics here. This is a personal blog; the opinions are mine alone.

It's Still Too Late - Jim Grisanzio - There's certainly some level of competition between Linux and OpenSolaris but I concur with Jim that it's not a zero-sum game. This is a pretty good article (and not just because I'm accurately quoted in it) but there is a tendency in the press and elsewhere to paint it as a contest with a winner and a loser.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

I really enjoy lobster cooked this way. It's based on a recipe that Jasper White popularized in his restaurants. (See e.g. Lobster at Home) It looks complicated, but isn't really so long as you have the right gear assembled. In fact, one of the nice things about this meal is that you can do a lot of the work a couple of hours in advance so this meal can actually involve less last minute mess and fuss than steamed/boiled lobster. (Less mess at the table too.)

The changes I've made mostly relate to some of the preparation details. In particular, I prefer to parboil the lobsters rather than cut them up alive which, in my experience, leads to pieces of lobster thrashing around the cutting board. It's just more drama than I consider absolutely necessary for this dish.

As for equipment, you'll want a large pot for the lobster of course. As for the pan-roasting part, if your oven is large enough to accommodate it, I find a 16-inch Lodge cast iron skillet that I picked up last summer just about perfect. That should handle about four to six lobsters in the chicken to two pound range. If you don't have a big enough skillet or a big enough oven, a workable alternative is to use a baking sheet for the oven part and one or two skillets, as required, on the stove. You will also want a long-necked lighter or some other suitable implement next to the stove to flame the bourbon.

Lobster is inexpensive right now, so go for it!

Ingredients for four people.

4 to 6 lobsters (1.25 to 2 lb.)

3 TBS peanut oil

1/3 cup bourbon (can also use Cognac)

1/2 cup white wine

8 TBS unsalted butter, cut into slices and chilled

1/4 cup of chopped parsley or chervil

1 TBS finely chopped chives

White pepper and salt

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Parboil the lobsters for about 4 minutes. If you don't have a pot large enough to accommodate all the lobsters, you can do this step in two batches. (You'll need one of those big steamer pots or equivalent.)

Once the lobsters have cooled enough to handle, remove the tails, the claws, and the knuckles/arms. Cut the tails in half lengthwise. Thoroughly crack open the claws and the knuckles to minimize the amount of cracking and picking that needs to be done at the table. You'll now have six pieces per lobster plus the body, which you can discard or use to make stock. Weather permitting I prefer to do this operation outside to keep all the lobstery fluids out of the kitchen. If you like, you can prepare the lobster to this point a couple of hours in advance and put it in the refrigerator.

Preheat the broiler. Position an oven rack in the upper third of the oven. Assemble all you ingredients and equipment by the stove. The pan will be hot and you'll want to move quickly. The final preparation only takes about ten minutes so everything else should be more or less ready to go for dinner before beginning.

Place your sauté pan over the highest heat possible. Allow it to heat for a few minutes until it becomes extremely hot. Add the oil and heat it until it forms a film on the surface of the pan. Slide the lobster pieces, shell side down, into the hot oil. Using tongs, move the pieces in order to evenly sear all the shells.

When the shells have all turned bright red,which should take no more than two or three minutes, turn the pieces over.

Place the pan in the oven and cook for about three minutes until the shells are slightly browned. It's OK if they're a bit charred in places. Put it on the stove over high heat. It will be very hot! You can put the plates in the oven to warm at this point.

Add the bourbon and ignite. Add the wine and allow to reduce until it is almost dry; a few tablespoons or so will remain in the pan.

Remove the pan from the heat. Remove lobster pieces and arrange on the plates.

Return the pan to low heat. Add the butter and herbs. Season with some white pepper and maybe a little salt (the lobster will be somewhat salty already) and spoon over lobster pieces on plates.

Holiday gift guide: Cookbook edition - Megan McArdle - "I've never been able to get into The Joy of Cooking; somehow, it's sensibility of comfortable shoes and stuffing olives into the gaping maw of Midwestern ennui oppresses me." I've never been a huge Joy fam myself though I couldn't explain why so snarkily.

Technology Review: Are Social Networks Sinking? - "At least there has not been the same profligate investing that there was during the dotcom days. There is no counterpart to the excesses of investors who put $830 million into Webvan or $280 million into Kozmo.com."

Yet the strategy hasn’t been fully put in place, partly because micronutrients have zero glamour. There are no starlets embracing iodine. And guess which country has taken the lead in this area by sponsoring the Micronutrient Initiative? Hint: It’s earnest and dull, just like micronutrients themselves.

Comment on: Kindle: Great gift for Washington's Birthday? - Great comment: "I'm as technophile as anybody, but I've learned to be leery of proprietary systems--and knowledgeable of obsolescence. (I've got boxes full of floppies and stacks of Syquest cartridges to prove it. On the other hand, I've got books from mid-19th century Germany that still work just fine, even though the manufacturer went out of business during the Franco-Prussian war."

Friday, December 05, 2008

Dynamist Blog: Depression Lust, and Depression Porn - "If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s."

Understanding Google’s Strategy - I would need some time to really digest and think about the details but looks to be a rather thorough presentation about Google's business model and opportunities.

Sears on my mind - Megan McArdle - An amusing tirade about Sears customer service. Personally I've been generally happy with their appliance repair although it's more or less a given that they will never show up the first time with the part no matter how accurately you describe the problem.

First of all: I love, truly love, the original "Grinch" show, by which I mean the 1966 Chuck Jones cartoon based on Dr. Seuss' book "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." It is 26 minutes of animated bliss, hilarious and silly and sneakily profound. It is, in fact, even better than the book; it has more (and more baroquely absurd) rhymes, a more satisfying ending, some small but sweet songs along with one very funny one, and, of course, Boris Karloff. Boris Karloff in a Christmas special - sheer genius.

But then came the abominable Jim Carrey movie, a bloated, vulgar exercise in Hollywood excess. And now comes the stage musical, about which the best that can be said is: It's not the Jim Carrey movie. That is, believe me, about as faint as faint praise can get.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Tweeter demonstrates how not to handle liquidation | Crave - CNET - Tweeter used to be a sorta premium (in a good way--good prices and better than average advice/service) A/V place in the Boston area. I'm not sure they ever figured out how to position themselves around big box retailers as they grew in prominence and the niche audiophile outfits.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Partisan Cracks | Culture11 - "Bill Maher and Jon Stewart want to be both humorists and pundits. But they can't have it both ways." This is true with tech reportage and commentary as well. You can't be both an entertainer/provocateur on an ongoing basis and a serious analyst.

tecosystems » What Would SOG Do?: Views on Sun - Generally agree with this analysis although I might be inclined to relatively emphasize different points. At this point, things like Open Office funding are pretty small potatoes in the scheme of things. Issue seems far more execution (including around the boring but profitable stuff) than strategy.

Monday, December 01, 2008

I'm getting my recipe files in order for the first time in ages. One of my objectives is to get them into digestible electronic form so that I can easily put them together into a book. (Not to publish for "real" but because it's a convenient format and so I can give a few copies away to friends and family.)

Anyway, I figured that as part of this process I'd start putting some of the contents online in the form of blog postings. Here's the first.

Lobster is dirt cheap right now so, on the way home from Thanksgiving up in Maine, I stopped at Simpson's Seafood in Wiscasset and picked up a whopping 11 lobsters. The next day, I parboiled the batch, made Pan-Fried Roast Lobster from a few of them, and removed the rest of the meat for lobster rolls or to freeze. This left me with lots of lobster shells and bodies. It seemed a pity to waste so I made some stock.

(As with any stock making, quantities aren't critical but this is roughly what I used.)

Bodies and other leftover parts of 8-12 lobsters

2 roughly chopped carrots

2 roughly chopped celery ribs

2 chopped onions

6 minced garlic cloves

2 bay leaves

3 thyme sprigs

Water to mostly cover lobster (about 6 to 8 quarts)

Cut the head off the lobster bodies and split open.

Add all the ingredients to a large pot. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

Strain through a cheesecloth-lined fine sieve (It may be easier to do a first pass through a coarser sieve). Cool and refrigerate up to 4 days or freeze.

As things currently stand with this cyberbullying case, the defendant has been acquitted of felony charges but found guilty of misdemeanors. What's a bit unusual is that the prosecution used a federal anti-hacking law. As Chris Soghoian writes on CNET:

The specifics of the Lori Drew case are messy and emotional. The important fact is that there is no federal cyberbullying statute, so the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles turned to a novel interpretation of existing computer hacking laws to try to punish the woman. The general idea is that in creating terms of service, a Web site owner specifies the rules of admission to the site. If someone violates any of those contractual terms, the "access" to the Web site is done without authorization, and is thus hacking.

As a result, we're seeing a huge divide between what I'll call the "silicon valley crowd" (even if lots of the plugged-in techies live elsewhere) and "everyone else" in their opinions about the case.

For their part, much of the commentary at places like CNET and Groklaw is apoplectic about the guilty verdict, even as a misdemeanor. The issue (which I'm sympathetic to myself) is that violating a Web site's term of service should not be a violation of the law. As a practical matter, we're not seeing the end of the Internet as we know it; no one is going to prosecute you for shaving a few pounds off your weight in an online profile. But it is a troubling precedent.

However, what's striking to me is the level of outrage of everyone else--even the "everyone else" that's actively engaged enough with online sites to leave comments. But this outrage is at the dismissal of the felony charges. What matters is punishing a person who behaved very badly with tragic consequences, not defending somewhat esoteric legal principles. In a lot of comments, I sense genuine puzzlement (and anger) directed at people who place the right to online anonymity higher than the morally "right" deciusion in this case.

If things remain as they are, this case provides an unfortunately good example of the legal saying that "hard cases make bad law."

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

"The root of these problems is that eBay is no longer a place where people can go to find inexpensive goods for sale.

It has transformed, through it's own strategy, to a marketplace of fixed price sellers. And these fixed price sellers charge as much or more than places like Amazon for the same goods. So, as a buyer, why should I wade through hundreds of amateurish listings, deal with massive gouging on shipping, and worry about getting the product from some fly-by-night seller when I can one-click it on Prime from Amazon, get guaranteed authentic goods, delivered in 2 days, with no hassle returns, from a vendor I completely trust, often for less money?"

Some Shed Their Gadgets by Turning to One: iPhone - WSJ.com - At first I thought this had to be the Onion: "Lower-income households are turning in force to Apple Inc.'s iPhone and may be doing so to save the cost of a separate broadband connection and music devices, according to the media measurement firm comScore Inc." I also like "Others believe that the surge in popularity of the iPhone among lower-income consumers is related more to the decline in price to about $200." Apparently lower-income consumers also can't do math as the per-month fees went up for a net price increase.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Netflix Lands on TiVo! - From the comments: "Big picture: this is the death of premium cable. Why pay an extra $5, $10 a month for HBO and Cinemax? Buy the one or two shows you want to watch (DVD, unbox, AppleTV), and get the crappy movies from Netflix." I've never felt that that premium cable was worth it. Certainly as options increase, become even less so.

Azure manages to avoid a Hailstorm of criticism | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News - "But businesses now have to evaluate not just the theory of whether allowing others to hold their data is a good thing. The reality is that, in many cases, large third parties may be able to do more to protect a company's data than some mid-size firms can do on their own."Organizations have come to say, 'let's compare it to practical alternatives as opposed to some Utopian ideal," O'Kelly said."

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Pyrrhic Victory - I'm not sure how much relates to the writer's strike in some way, but I do know that there is a grand total of one new show that I've followed this season--and that one ("Fringe") I'm pretty lukewarm about.

Twitter / Kathy Sierra: The Big Question is not "h ... - "The Big Question is not "how can we make this a game?" but, "what is it that makes games fun, and how can [this experience] have that?"" Great observation. And one that a lot of commentary and attempts to make learning more "fun" misses.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Serena: Taking the Cloud Seriously | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog) - "Arteaga’s opinion - and it seems sound to me - is that a company that offers its products from the cloud needs to live in the cloud itself, to some degree. The company will then understand the practical aday-to-day cloud issues and will also be able to speak authoritatively on how cloud operation impacts the way you work."

HipMojo.com » 20 Dumb Things About Web 2.0 - I agree with a lot of the stuff here--such as "Much the same way that loose money and easy credit created the real estate and housing bubble, open source software and cheap hardware created an environment of over-supply of me-too products that have absolutely no bargaining power in M&A or fundraising."

Freemium is Not a Business Model | Mark Evans - "The problem is freemium doesn’t work for the vast majority of companies, especially ones focused on the consumer market. In theory, it sounds good but in practice few people actually pay for more features. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule but those are few and far between."

Thursday, October 16, 2008

I regularly receive emails along the lines of the following. (Redacted to protect the guilty.)

We were hoping to schedule some time with you later this month for a briefing with ACME. Your input and insight into the RANDOM TECHNOLOGY market space will provide a valuable forum for ACME's third generation product and technology offering.

Best Regards,Buffy

I usually just ignore such, but here's the response I would like to send.

Dear Buffy,

You seem to have mixed up my mailing address with some other ghaff who is in the “business” (not that it would be much of a business) of providing free consulting and market intelligence to anyone who drops me a line. I’m sure his input and insight will be commensurate with the high value that you appear to place on it. Good luck finding the other ghaff.

I'm more than happy, in the course of a conversation, to share my views on whatever. However, to brazenly request an hour of my time with the explicit expectation that I'm going to be briefing you for free is just not going to happen.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Thank you for smoking - Roger Ebert's Journal - "This stamp honoring Bette Davis was issued by the U. S. Postal Service on Sept. 18. The portrait by Michael Deas was inspired by a still photo from "All About Eve." Notice anything missing? Before you even read this far, you were thinking, Where's her cigarette? Yes reader, the cigarette in the original photo has been eliminated. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting, which seems so innocent, yet can have such tragic outcomes. But isn't this is carrying the anti-smoking campaign one step over the line?"

Technological comebacks | Not dead, just resting | The Economist - "American office workers’ use of paper has actually been in decline since 2001. What changed? The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological. A new generation of workers, who have grown up with e-mail, word processing and the internet, feel less of a need to print documents out than their older colleagues did. Offices are still far from paperless, but the trend is clear."

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing - A rather bleak take on the state of OpenOffice development. Based on my (much more peripheral) knowledge of what's been happening there, seems like a realistic assessment.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

I got out of the link posting rhythm because of lots of travel and other things. Should be back on track now (at least until the end of October).

What's In A Name? - Forbes.com - Pure venom. "Lotus Notes is far and away the most horrible software on the planet. Sure, people grumble about Microsoft products. But that's nothing compared to how people feel about Notes. People hate Notes. As in, they want to change jobs just so they can stop using it. I'm pretty sure there are shrinks who have built practices around it."

tecosystems » Is the Cloud Stupid? - "But still, in the face of end user ignorance and the impracticality of his alternative, Stallman’s quest seems - at best - quixotic. Again. Only this time, I expect him to have rather less success than in years past." Concur. As Stephen says, it's happening. Better to deal with the real issues rather than try to turn back the clock.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Monday, September 08, 2008

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Omnigoogle - Typically good post by Nick Carr about how essentially everything on the Internet complements Google's core ad business and makes it more money as a result. "Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money."

Tip for MS: Fire the Advertising Agency - This sounds about right: "Yeesh. MS doesn't need an re-introduction; Vista needs one. Regardless of the actual qualities of Vista, MS has allowed the notion that it sucks to spread. That's the problem they need to deal with, and having Seinfeld imagine the PC as a piece of cake at some nebulous time in the future simply isn't the answer. "

F|R: What Startups Can Learn From Billy “Moneyball” Beane - GigaOM - "Trust your data. Even when your intuition suggests otherwise. You have to have the courage and conviction to trust your data, and act on it, Nelson says. If your data says spending money on conferences like CES or Web 2.0 Summit does not convert to sales, don’t go — no matter how important you think it is to be seen at such events." I used to work for someone who was always deeply skeptical about all these trade shows that everyone said we had to attend.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Patience? I've run out of patience and I would cancel and go to Blockbuster but they say I've already got an account with them, which isn't true. I'm sure it's my address.

This is unacceptable and as it's been a week, the credit better be at least 25% of my monthly fees.

"Around the clock" ~ yeah, and you've got a bridge in Brooklyn you'd like to sell me.

I really have to wonder about anyone for whom getting their DVDs delayed a few days is apparently some great existential crisis in their lives. If you can't or won't just go outside, there's lots of Olympic footage to watch.

Nieman Reports - "The risk for journalism, of course, is that people spend all day Twittering and reading other people's Twitter entries and don't engage with the news in any other way." Good piece on twitter. Although I think it can become too much of a distraction if you let it.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

When Google disowns you | Software as Services | ZDNet.com - This may apply less to Google, but most Web 2.0 companies are very lightly staffed for their transaction volume. My observation is that many are not really prepared to deal well with issues that require a human to individually resolve.

451 CAOS Theory » LinuxWorld 2008 - nobody cares - I didn't even seriously consider attending LinuxWorld this year and I have seen a real downturn in the LinuxWorld-related briefing requests, etc. And the comments are unintentionally hilarious--the Linux Hater's blog couldn't have done it better.

tecosystems » Big Brother is Watching You. On Twitter. - No easy answer here. I guess that one could have two accounts and keep the personal one invitation only. And make those invitations strictly for "real friends" as opposed to professional acquaintances that I more or less like. I felt similarly when I got my first professional friend-request on facebook. I'm more or less resigned to it but mostly because I don't really have an active network of friends on facebook. I might feel differently if I did.

tecosystems » Will There Be Only One Cloud? - I'm probably between the extremes here. I'm not sure I really buy the "five computers" theme but I think there could be more centralization. Would like to understand the economics of scale better.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Language on Twitter » Delusions of Adequacy - Interesting discussion about language on twitter. One of the challenges is that it's very much a mix of personal and professional with the way that individuals use it very dependent on the individual.

SEC says blogs = proper disclosure » mathewingram.com/work | - I mostly agree with Mathew here. It's a welcome change but there are all sorts of reasons that public companies will still tend to push out material announcements in a formal, legal-vetted form. It will probably be comporting for companies that if something gets mentioned in a blog but not a press release that it will be less cause for concerb, but I don't see them dispensing with the press release.

Opt-in or opt-out? Street View case echoes privacy debate - I'm not sure how germane it is here; the Street Views opt-out process seems more a case of Google making the tradeoff that small incremental coverage isn't worth angry people. But the basic point about the war between opt-in and opt-out models is certainly true.

I've been toying with this idea of how valuable social networks are for a while now. Not value in any quantitative sense, but how things work conceptually. Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²), is often invoked in this regard. However, I'm not sure it really captures the dynamics of social networks which place a relative premium on the right kind of connections.

Anyway, it strikes me that there are two critical points when it comes to the value of a social network--or, indeed, any communications network.

The first is the point of critical mass. Critical mass is the idea that we reach a point where there are enough people in one of our relevant social groups connected through a product or technology that it starts to have real value. This value, in turn, starts to provide a real incentive for others in that social group to get on the network, increasing its value still further.

Let me give you an example from past lives. I first had access to email in an MIT lab in 1978 or so. It was sort of neat. I occasionally traded emails with a friend who worked in the MIT AI Lab. I didn't know anyone else on email though so it wasn't really especially useful.

Flash forward to the late-1980s. I had email at work, but it was a closed system. My personal email was through Compuserve. I used it a bit--I used BBS message boards a lot more--but, for example, it wasn't all that useful for things like organizing hiking trips or board meetings because only a few people in those groups were on email. So I had to resort to snail mail and telephone anyway. The sea change came when enough people were on email that I could start treating it as the preferred and default communications medium. Over time, backup communications methods became more and more deprecated until everyone pretty much had to be on email.

Whether it's a true point or just some exponential growth relationship, the fact remains that network value is hard to grow at first but if it can get to a certain mass, things really take off. I think we're seeing this right now with analysts and analyst relations folks on twitter. Once enough people are using a given network, it puts pressure on the rest to join as well.

(Conversely, this is probably why I don't get a lot of value out of facebook. There I don't really have a critical mass of friends for whom facebook could provide a useful coordination point.)

At the other end of the scale, I see a given social network stopping to increase in value after a while--certainly at the same rate. Once my network is saturated--perhaps I'm already spending as much time on twitter as I care to, a larger network size doesn't increase the value of twitter to me; I'll cap the number of people I follow even if my number of followers rises. Other networks just tend to cap at a particular size and value because all the relevant people are on and using it.

Even more interesting is the idea that a social network's value can actually decrease past a certain point. (See Clay Shirky's thoughts on the subject.) Further thoughts deserve a separate post but, essentially, what I think of as "pollution" can set in. Think of the problems with email today. Or, historically, the "Eternal September."

In short, it's hard to get a network to the point where it has real value. This is another face of the familiar bootstrapping problem. At the same time, especially absent appropriate access and filtering controls, that same network can collapse under its own weight if it grows too large.

Coding Horror: Alpha, Beta, and Sometimes Gamma - "there are two clear trends: The definition of beta grows more all-encompassing and elastic every year. We are awfully eager to throw alpha quality code over the wall to external users and testers."

Call Me Fishmeal.: “The Mojave Experiment:” Bad Science, Bad Marketing - Great line: "Vista is known for people initially liking it, then after a while discovering it’s not working for them, and “downgrading” to XP. This study has told us exactly what we already knew: that, initially, people like Vista. (Initially, people like having sex without condoms, too... it’s simply not a very good criterion all by itself.)"

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

SarahLacy.com: Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud! - "I've been vocal in my criticism of Yahoo's bungling of excellent services they've acquired, most notably Delicious. While they managed not to screw up the beauty that is Flickr, they've done absolutely nothing in over three years of delicious ownership." I've made the same comments about del.icio.us though I hink Sarah is a bit kind WRT flickr.

tecosystems » OSCON is People - I concur with Stephen's sense of OSCON. Lots of interesting sessions and discussions but no obvious single center of gravity. (Which, as he says, is just fine.)

louisgray.com: Facebook Still Banning Aliases to Avoid Becoming Fakebook - I'm generally sympathetic to the point of view that it's eminently reasonable under a lot of circumstances to have an Internet nom de plume that's not associated with a real world identity. One problem though is that once you allow fake, there's no way to draw the line at a single consistent online identity.

Megan McArdle (July 30, 2008) - It's a small world after all - "I suspect that Twitter, Facebook, and whatever comes after them will mean denser, richer social networks in the future. Already, email is holding people together after college a lot more tightly than the people I graduated with--the last graduating class, basically, before the Web. "

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Marginal Revolution: Are books overwritten? - Interesting discussion on the length of books. I've often felt that a lot of business books could probably fit well in a long magazine article--with perhaps some more supporting background.

Novell-developer Michael Meeks interview - Whether or not Sun is handling this perfectly or not, it’s hard to see how there’s any real justification to their funding development of OpenOffice. The ODF wars are largely over for better or worse. Sun is not a fat client company in any sense. And, of course, they’re not exactly Google with all sorts of resources to fritter on non-strategic efforts.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Farewell, Bill Gates - Forbes.com - "I think Microsoft will play defense from here on out. Its army of M.B.A.s will milk the monstrous franchise around Windows and Office for all it's worth and try to cushion a decline in originality and create a soft landing. The future for Microsoft looks lucrative, predictable and boring."

The Hard Part of SaaS - I think this is an important point. Web 2.0ish-created expectations notwithstanding, there's no reason to think that enterprise SaaS apps should be free or even especially cheap.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Linux Hater's Blog: The fallacy of choice - "Let's look at the server side. Why does Linux succeed here? One of the big reasons is that there is a working baseline. Everyone knows what it's called: LAMP. If in doubt, start with LAMP."

The Long Tail: What he said - "Which is going to be worth more in ten years: the leaky boat of a network TV franchise or the relentlessly growing collection of long tail video at YouTube?" Not always clear (especially in the general case). It depends if there's a path to monetizing the long tail or not.

Along with a variety of my analyst relations, public relations, and analyst colleagues (among others), I've gotten into the twitter "micro-blogging" service of late. Although it's still early days, my current assessment is that this service--or one of its competitors--is more likely to maintain a long-standing place in my toolbox than, say, Facebook--which I find I use pretty sporadically.

My current client of choice is twhirl, an Adobe AIR application that I generally keep open in a column running down the left-hand side of one of my monitors. I keep this monitor as sort of a communications center. Along with twhirl, it displays my email and instant messaging clients (Outlook and Trillian respectively).

I also took a look at TweetDeck, another AIR application, this morning. It can be set to display all your twitter traffic in a single column in a way that's pretty similar to twhirl. It can also display multiple columns with replies, direct messages, or a selected subset of the users you're following. Interesting idea but I'd like to see a somewhat different take on the groups concept (and more control of resizing windows and columns).

Let me explain in the context of how I handle RSS feeds in my client. I divide my RSS feeds into several categories. One I call "A-priority." This is basically the stuff that I really want to skim through even if I'm on the road or have a busy day. Doesn't always work that way, of course, but that's the goal. Then I have various other groups for general technology, miscellaneous, tips and tricks, and so forth. This is stuff that I like to flip through but often don't have time for. It also includes some sources that may have interesting stuff but pump out so much material that I don't want it all ending up in my "must read" pile.

I'd like to see a similar concept in twitter clients. Let me create a group A, B, and so forth. That would give me the option to follow some people, especially those who post a lot, on a sort of secondary basis as time permits without diluting my main list. (TweetDeck doesn't quite do this in that you can't turn off "All Tweets" and doesn't provide any way to make sure that a user is in only one group.)

My colleague Jonathan Eunice has also wished for a way to stop displaying read posts. I would envision this also working similarly to the way it does on my RSS client. Just hit a "Mark All Read" button and the display clears. This would be useful when you scroll back to read older tweets and avoids the mental energy with figuring out "Did I read this?"

Overall, a service that I'm finding most useful and fun. Twitter's own infrastructure has ongoing growing pains but some incremental work on the client side would help too.

Why There Aren't More Googles - I think this is the money quote: "Startups have gotten cheaper. That means they want less money, but also that there are more of them. So you can still get large returns on large amounts of money; you just have to spread it more broadly."

The Long Tail: The Long Tail of Baby Names - I thought this was sort of an interesting statistic when I saw it yesterday. To the degree that there's a decline of, say, viewers of the top-rated TV programs there probably are some common causes: a more heterogeneous population, fewer shared cultural touchstones, and so forth.

How Getty Is Killing the Stock Photo Industry - A Picture's Worth - "As much as Getty would like to position this move as an open embrace of the community, it's not. Instead, it's a way to lock out competition, and allow them to continue with status quo. They're hopeful that this infusion of content can somehow staunch the flat/declining growth of their traditional licensing revenue, and why not? Their growth has historically been predicated on acquisition of boutique agency content until they bought virtually everyone up, and alienated thousands of photographers and buyers in the process."

About Me

I'm technology evangelist for Red Hat, the leading provider of commercial open source software. I'm a frequent speaker at customer and industry events. I also write extensively on and develop strategy for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio.

Prior to Red Hat, as an IT industry analyst, I wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies. Among other hobbies, I do a lot of photography and enjoy the outdoors.